Removing downloaded macOS text to speech voices

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I recently played around with using macos-speech-server for STT/TTS in Home Assistant. When experimenting with avspeech, the macOS-native speech engine, I discovered that macOS 26 no longer allows you to delete voice packs after installing them — the management UI is gone, and the advice online about swiping in the list doesn’t work.

At 100–500MB per voice, these add up.

Unfortunately, deleting the files from /System/Library/AssetsV2/ is blocked by system integrity protection: even sudo can’t do it.

Fortunately these are “mobile assets”, so there’s a macOS framework to manage them. Claude and I pulled together a Swift script that uses that framework to list the voice assets and let you delete the ones you no longer want. I put it on GitHub.

Macos on rnewman

Removing downloaded macOS text to speech voices